past events & lectures

Scientific Program Meeting

The Ethical Significance of Psychoanalysis

Free For Members & NYPSI Students

Tuesday, February 9, 2016
8:00 PM

"The Ethical Significance of Psychoanalysis" with Jonathan Lear, Ph.D.

Plato and Aristotle thought that to live well we need to be able to live well with others. Ethical life, they thought, was a happy life for human beings. To make their case, they invented psychology -- they needed to give a robust account of the well functioning psyche. Their efforts were remarkably sophisticated, but given their methods and concerns they could only get so far. But they left an important legacy. This talk will explore the ways psychoanalysis can take up this inheritance and develop it.

Jonathan Lear is John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University Of Chicago. He is currently the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, a new research institute at the University. He is also a trained psychoanalyst and sees a small number of patients in private practice. He is a member of the faculties of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. He was educated at Yale, Cambridge University and the Rockefeller University. Before coming to Chicago he taught at Cambridge University, where he was a Fellow of Clare College, and at Yale where he was the Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities. His books include Freud (in a recently issued second edition),Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation; Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony; A Case for Irony; Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis; Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life, and Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. Lear is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.